Tài liệu Mastering the craft of science writing part 2 pdf

certainly.” And saying this, she pounced on the manuscript, pounced, using her whole body, arms and shoulders, not just her hands, to scribble in the words that made it just the slightest bit better. Only then did she look up and acknowledge me. I didn’t realize it right away, but that eager, egoless, un- guarded “Oh, yes, certainly” stuck with me: Thank you, Elise. From a distance of twenty-five years, I write now of a tricky little professional situation. But for her, I am certain, it didn’t exist. For her there was no editor or writer, no senior or ju- nior, no man or woman, no vanity, no pettiness, no person- alities. There were only the words, and the ideas they ex- pressed, that were our job, together, to get right. Nothing else mattered. And everything that mattered was on that page. I write of a time during the late 1970s and 1980s when I and a few other young writers—freelancers, interns, office assistants, kids just starting out—worked with Elise at the magazine. Most of what I know today about writing, espe- cially writing about science, medicine, and other difficult subjects, I learned then. Others did, too. Those who came to see the ceaseless flow of red ink as the gift that it was went on to great things. They wrote for Time and Discover and Life. They edited the magazines of elite universities. They wrote books, won awards and fellowships, made names for them- selves. And their writing lives mostly started in that little of- fice in Whitehead Hall that Elise, with her madcap creativity and breathtaking intelligence—you’ll see ample evidence for both in the pages that follow—made entirely hers. Elise had become editor a couple of years before and had set about making her little bimonthly into something far more than a mere alumni magazine; what the New Yorker was to the urbane literary and cultural life of New York City, the Johns Hopkins Magazine would be to the scientific, scholarly, and creative world of Johns Hopkins University, with long, thoughtful articles and clear, graceful prose. An anthropolo- gist at work. Cervical cancer. Rockets shot into the sky. An issue following medical students through their four years. Charming little Christmas presents to her readers, like pup- pets of chimerical creatures. Each year, she and her staff would walk off with awards for fine writing, and twice dur- ing her tenure, Johns Hopkins Magazine was named best univer- sity magazine in the country. Foreword x Me? I’d been a freelance writer for a few years, had prema- turely tried to write a book, and now, after some time away, had returned to Baltimore, where I was managing the rent on a tiny apartment but not much more. About a year earlier, combing for freelance assignments among local newspaper and magazine editors, I’d made an appointment to meet Ms. Hancock. It was the perfect time. It was 1976 and Elise was hungry. The university was celebrating the hundred years since its founding, and numerous centennial events—seminars, con- ferences, and celebrations—were being held. The university magazine, with its two-person staff, was supposed to cover as many of them as possible and needed freelancers to help fill centennial-fat issues. Elise assigned me to attend one of these events, a symposium on decision making, and write about it. I did so capably enough that in coming months she gave me more work. Capably enough? That didn’t mean you were the next Tom Wolfe or John McPhee. Just that you had some slight feel for language and seemed to understand what you were writing about. Elise was always relieved when one of her new writ- ers proved as curious as she was, got the facts right and the story straight.You could have all the word magic in the world, she used to say, but if you were going to misquote distinguished scholars, and skate superficially over the life’s work of world-class scientists, and think you were going to get away with spinning pretty verbal webs around what you couldn’t be bothered to understand, then how could she work with you? Elise was interested in science and ideas, and she was impatient with writers who weren’t. So, while I hadn’t the sheer verbal facility of some who came through her door, I had enough of this other quality to keep landing assignments. A conference on war gaming. A peculiar mov- ing-walkway engineering project. Then, longer pieces on re- combinant DNA, evolution, the ecology of the Chesapeake Bay, particle physics, laser surgery. Over the next ten years or so, I did about three dozen pieces for her, most of them long and ambitious. And always—at least at the beginning, before word processors, when I still used my old Smith-Corona portable—the time would come when we’d sit down with the manuscript. This is the part that usually gets freighted with nostalgia, with sepia visions of crisp white paper smacked by those Foreword xi great old typewriter keys, of ink smudges and red editorial squiggles and slashes garlanding the page, and great XXXs smooshing through whole paragraphs. But do you know what those squiggles and slashes and XXXs do? They change your words and ideas, develop them, reorder them, dismem- ber them, turn them inside out, or obliterate them alto- gether. They signify, at some level, that your literary expres- sion is tedious or crude, your ideas silly, boring, wrong, or off the point. Or that you’ve left a thought undeveloped or muddled, a scene or story vague, flat, or insipid. Together, they imply that what you’ve done won’t do, and that what the editor has done, through her marks, scrawls, and penned-in changes, is much, much better. Better, that is, in her opinion. But what if you, the author, begged to disagree? Well, I did disagree. A lot. Elise’s emendations, after all, weren’t chemical formulae, right or wrong, but expressions of judgment and taste. And I was too young, sure, and stub- born to accept hers for the wisdom they embodied. So she’d say, This is too much, Rob. And I’d say, No, it’s not. She’d say, You need to rethink this, Rob. And I’d say, No, it’s fine the way it is. Rob, do you think the reader wants to know all this? Rob, what is it, really, that you want to say? Most of the time, of course, Elise was right, and I’d later come to see as much. But not without a fight. After all, these were my words—my ideas, mine, me. Every word became a battle, and poor Elise was left to explain why she saw things as she did. Mostly, she did so patiently. Sometimes, though, her normally composed features would tighten into annoy- ance and her criticisms could be harsh. But one way or the other, sitting beside her at her desk, the manuscript on the sliding desk tray between us, I learned. I can attest to the wisdom of the writerly injunctions you’ll find in these pages because at times I’ve ignored them all. For example, Do not confuse a topic with a story idea. That’s just what I did once with a long piece about memory. What about memory? Well, everything about memory. Elise helped me save it, almost; I wound up saying that an understanding of memory still eluded researchers, and that it was a multi- faceted phenomenon, duh. But the piece was never as good as it should have been because my topic, one of Elise’s dreaded noun-ideas, never found its proper focus. It was all over the place. Literally so: The piece was littered with enough side- Foreword xii bars to tell any savvy reader that its author didn’t know what his story was about. Before first meeting Elise, I’d written a mercifully unpub- lished book about urban life with a good title, City Sunrise, but little else of merit. After we’d begun to work together, I let Elise read it. At the time, she was tactful, even gentle. But later, whenever I wrote something that pleased her, any com- pliments she dispensed would take the form of how, yes, I had certainly made progress since City Sunrise. Even after my work began to enjoy her favor, she’d freely poke fun at its infelicities. My prose, she said, reminded her of a noisy, congested city street, cabs whizzing, pedestrians darting, horns honking, all calling attention to themselves to maddening effect. By now, of course, this image is acid- etched on my brain tissue, helping to pull me back from my worst excesses. And through a hundred such vivid images and stern directives, Elise remains beside me today. She doesn’t always win the battle against my writing demons, but she’s always there, at my elbow, fighting the good fight against poor form and sloppy thinking. This, then, is the happy payoff for my pigheadedness all those years ago, one I could scarcely then have imagined: Each time Elise answered my objections or demolished my literary conceits, she’d draw me into the rare and splendid precincts of her mind. And in doing so, she’d bestow just the sorts of insights you’ll find in the pages of this book. I speak now not of such matters of common sense and good profes- sional practice as double-checking names, though these count, too. But rather of a rich sensibility of respect. For lan- guage. For ideas. For people. For the surprising and the deli- ciously weird in us all. And most of all, respect for the world, the endlessly enthralling “real” world outside us. Elise is the supreme nonfictionist; you won’t find that word in the dictionary, but I know she would approve. Many writ- ers, unconsciously or not, subscribe to a hierarchy that makes fiction the goal to which any real writer aspires, non- fiction a sad second-best; bitterly they toil in nonfiction vineyards, dreaming of novels and stories they will write some day. Not so Elise. She read fiction, gobs of it, of every kind, from Jane Austen on down, even the occasional ro- mance novel; her imagination was vigorous and playful, en- riched by fictional worlds.Yet I never sensed in her any re- Foreword xiii gret at being sadly stuck in a workaday world of real people discovering drearily real things about the immune system, estuarine ecology, or gluons. Rather, I learned from her that there was wonder in the world and that a writer’s greatest pleasure was to tell of it. Tell of it, mind you, not to the already expert but to every- one else. Technical reports for technicians? Scholarly articles for scholars? These had no place in Elise’s magazine.When her writers took on stories in anthropology, oncology, or cosmology, they wrote not to specialists or other scientists but to Elise’s “educated curious”; this made it “science writ- ing,” not “scientific writing” or “technical writing.” Science writing is so hard to do well because it dares aim intellectu- ally formidable material at just those readers presumed to have little background, education, or interest in it. Science writers and editors needn’t start off knowing much science. Some of the best of them do, but some of the best of them don’t. They must, though, be able to learn sci- ence, be eager to wade into its complexities, ask intelligent questions, and shake off the high intimidation quotient of a dense, jargon-laden article in the Proceedings of the National Acad- emy of Sciences. Elise was a member of this breed; she was an English major in college and took only a handful of science courses.Yet in sending her magazine out to joust with sci- ence, medicine, and technology, she was fearless. Once, long ago—before the genome project, before the rise of the big biotech companies—two Johns Hopkins re- searchers figured out how to snip DNA, the molecule that embodies life’s genetic heritage, at particular points. Pretty soon, scientists were taking pieces of DNA from bacteria and slipping them into other organisms. Some people began to worry about the dangers and called a meeting at the Asilo- mar conference center in California to discuss them. This was a big science story and, since Hopkins re- searchers had played so crucial a role, a big Hopkins story. Elise resolved that Johns Hopkins Magazine would cover it—more particularly, that I would cover it.What a team! She had no grounding in molecular biology. I had never taken so much as an undergraduate biology course. But so what? We could do it. And we did. The result was “Pandora’s Box, Chapter XI: Splicing the Double Helix.” It reads a bit breathlessly today. But, then again, that was the atmosphere of the time, even among some normally circumspect scientists. And our read- Foreword xiv ers became conversant with issues that, in new forms, linger with us today. I learned a little biology. But more, much more, I learned to swim out from shore and into the rough seas of hard sci- ence, and not worry too much that I would drown. Over the years, I’ve kept a journal of writing advice that I share with my students or otherwise draw from. I’d thought of this as altogether fresh, reflecting my own experiences as a writer, my own particular take on things. So it was chasten- ing to read Elise’s book and see that many ideas and insights I’d thought were distinctively mine were, in fact, distinc- tively hers. Oh, at times I found myself thinking, No, that’s not how I’d do it. Elise says to use a tape recorder, that all journalists do. Well, most journalists do, but not all; I don’t. Elise says that after immersing yourself in your material you should hold off writing, think things through first; begin writing only “when you’re clear enough that you won’t go wrong.” I never get that clear. I use the act of writing itself to find that elusive clarity, slogging through swamps of nonsense and in- coherence to get there. But far more typically, there they are in black and white— insights, ideas, strategies, and preoccupations I’d identified as mine plainly culled from Elise over our years together. For example, her highlighted, boldfaced kernel of pure Elise wis- dom: LISTEN, really listen. And mundane things: How, be- fore an interview, you carefully set out written questions— then, during the interview, mostly ignore them. How, before you write, you compose a headline or title: I’d always been pleased with myself for abandoning the more common ad- vice that a title came last, after the hard work of writing.Yet here Elise reveals it for the profound compositional trick it really is. Writing a headline, she writes, “will force you to get precise about both topic and approach.” Reading Elise’s book today reminds me that wisdom and good sense can get passed down, that sometimes we truly can learn from one another. I am so proud to be Elise’s student. Read this book and I suspect you will be, too. Robert Kanigel Foreword xv This page intentionally left blank Many thanks to John Marcham, former editor of the Cornell Alumni News, who trained me; to E. B. White and Will Strunk Jr., who were my mentors through their classic book; to Rob Kanigel and Jackie Wehmueller, who egged me on; to Jack Goellner, Katherine Hancock, and Mary Ruth Yoe, who showed the manuscript no mercy; to the many patient scientists who coached me on their work; to my friends and colleagues at other university magazines, who were always just a phone call away; to the dozens of writers with whom I sat on the floor and ar- gued over manuscripts until we got it right; and to the readers of this book, who I hope will carry on the good work with the care and integrity I have valued in all these people. Acknowledgments This page intentionally left blank Ideas into Words . interest in it. Science writers and editors needn’t start off knowing much science. Some of the best of them do, but some of the best of them don’t. They must,. shake off the high intimidation quotient of a dense, jargon-laden article in the Proceedings of the National Acad- emy of Sciences. Elise was a member of